Carl
Stalling and Humor in Cartoons

What exactly is the role of music in cartoons?
This is a question I have been trying to answer for years. Music can serve
many functions within animated cartoons, several of which apply to its
more widely accepted big brother, live-action films. Music can set mood,
fill in "empty" sonic space, and emphasize motion. In cartoons,
music also helps to enliven and yes, animate, a long sequence of drawings
which, taken singularly, don't carry much life, or as a professor of mine
always said, "forward motion." The modern cartoon, and especially
the Hollywood cartoon from the Golden Age of Animation, relies so much
on music that it is truly difficult to conceive what they might have been
like without a soundtrack.

One more role that music may play in a cartoon (and occasionally in movies
as well) is that of storyteller; and what better stories to tell in a cartoon
than funny ones? When you look at cartoons from the 1940s and 1950s, one
of the primary roles of the music is to enhance the comedic affect of the
story or gag. Thus, the composer must make it his or her business to make
the music funny and, at the same time, still effective as a soundtrack.
Carl Stalling was, without a doubt, the most skilled and clever composer
of cartoon music Hollywood ever had; he not only created the scores to
hundreds of Warner Bros. cartoons (from 1936 to 1958), he essentially created
the sound that most fans of animated shorts know as, simply, "cartoon
music." His unique style (which we'll discuss in a moment) of using
songs for background music that had some nominal relation to the subject
at hand became his trademark; and while it was not looked well upon at
the time, people today have realized just how important and influential
these soundtracks have become in our society. The presence of two compact
discs of Stalling's music, The Carl Stalling Project, V. 1 & 2,
as well as several new recordings of Raymond Scott's more famous tunes
(those frequently used by Stalling) should be enough evidence, yet there
are other proofs, such as the smash touring company Bugs Bunny on Broadway,
which essentially is a celebration of the unique soundtracks of the
cartoons.

Stalling's Early Years
Stalling's origins as a silent movie accompanist reveal a great deal about
his character as a musician. Accompanists, more often than not, had to
create spontaneous scores for films, assisted only by thematic musical
catalogs. These books would have well-known material arranged for piano
and indexed according to the mood or ideas with which they were most often
associated. Stalling's job was more of a pastiche artist than a composer,
as he had to create a musical narrative with a wide array of genres, including
folk, classical, Tin Pan Alley, and big band, among others. When he went
to Warner Bros., this skill came in very handy. (Let's not forget the fact
that Stalling started his cartoon career with Disney, scoring two of the
first three Mickey cartoons, Plane Crazy and The Gallopin' Gaucho,
as well as writing Mickey's first theme song (with Disney), "Minnie's
Yoo-Hoo." He then worked at Iwerks' studio for a while before going
to Warner Bros.) One of the original stipulations made by the Warner Brothers
to Leon Schlesinger was that each cartoon had to have some portion (the
usual consensus is at least one verse and the chorus) of a Warner Bros.-owned
song. The studio's catalog at this time was enormous; yet, it was still
rather restricting for the writers to have to construct a story around
the idea of a song. By the time Stalling got to the studio, the demand
for song-based cartoons seemed to be slowing, yet Stalling immediately
saw the advantage of having such an extensive catalog of music at his disposal.
Thus, his musical vocabulary extended immensely, and he had a song for
literally every occasion.

Photo courtesy of Jerry Beck, Cartoon Research
Co.

Visual-Musical Gags
One thing that I have always loved about the Warner Bros. cartoons is some
of the old, campy gags that always draw groans from my friends. They seem
to think the jokes get old after a while, but I never tire of them. John
Tebbel, in his Film Comment article, "Looney Tunester,"
speaks somewhat disapprovingly of one of my favorite Stalling gags. It
is from the original Road Runner/Coyote cartoon, Fast and Furryous (1949).
After having sent off for some jet-powered running shoes (from Acme, no
doubt!), the Coyote seems to be on the verge of catching the Road Runner.
Their chase takes them farther down the highway, and we see via a high
shot from above that they are running around a cloverleaf. What was Stalling's
solution to this image, which would have meant nothing except for an appropriately
chosen song? Why, "I'm Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover," of course.
Stalling allows the music to tell a bit of the story, as opposed to letting
the music mimic the characters' actions. I once asked Chuck Jones, the
cartoon's director, about this choice of music, and he said, "That
was Carl's doing. It was kind of strange to me for him to do it, and it
was okay, but I didn't think everybody knew that it was that music."
Tebbel has a similar argument, agreeing with Jones that people would not
always recognize the tunes that Stalling had included as intentional gags.

A particularly notorious example is in Mutiny on the Bunny (1950).
Yosemite Sam the Pirate has lost his crew and is searching the docks for
new victims/crew for his ship. Bugs happens along, and is quickly tied
up and brought on board. Stalling's choice of music for this scene? A tune
called "Put `em in a Box, Tie `em With a Ribbon, and Throw `em in
the Deep Blue Sea." With a song that so perfectly matches the scene,
you really cannot blame Stalling for his selection, regardless of who gets
the musical gag. This ignorance of the actual meaning or context of the
original song actually works to Stalling's advantage, for while the viewer
may not glean the original ironic connection between the aural and visual
gags, the music becomes a gag itself if used often enough with the same
type of visual gag. Thus, "A Cup of Coffee, a Sandwich, and You",
a love song that has little to do with food other than its title, and which
Stalling used as his number-one song for food scenes (just picture Sylvester
putting Tweety between two slices of bread), actually becomes associated
with eating in the Warner Bros. cartoons. Entirely new generations of cartoon
watchers are exposed to music from Tin Pan Alley and other genres and learn
to appreciate it, albeit for a completely different reason.

Some of Stalling's more subtle jokes are actually some of his funniest.
The one that immediately comes to mind is in the Jones classic Mouse
Wreckers (1952), in which the two mice, Hubie and Bertie are trying
to rid the perfectly nice house in which they want to live of Claude Cat.
Their approach is simple enough: they torment him while he sleeps, and
then escape up the fireplace, so that he never actually sees who is torturing
him. After a particularly harrowing episode (having his tail tied to a
rock, which is thrown off the chimney, dragging him all over and around
the house), Claude decides to get some professional help. The next scene
opens with him reading a book, Psychology of Dreams by S. Freud.
On closer inspection, we notice he is reading the section on nightmares,
which tells him he should just say it was a dream and go back to sleep.
With a contented look on his face, Claude curls up and goes back to sleep.
The background music throughout this scene has been a very peaceful, lullaby-like
tune. In actuality, the tune we have been hearing is "Sweet Dreams,
Sweetheart," yet another Warner Bros. owned melody. Stalling once
again has the last laugh, and I cannot help but wonder if he knew he would
be one of the only people actually getting his jokes.

Stalling and the directors he worked with did not, by any means, limit
themselves to inside jokes. Some of the most memorable cartoons ever made
happen to be about music, such as What's Opera, Doc?, The Rabbit of
Seville, One Froggy Evening, and Rhapsody Rabbit. In this situation,
the director and writers work directly with the music to try and bring
out its inherent (and perhaps latent) comedic points. One example of this
should suffice. In The Rabbit of Seville (1950), Bugs and Elmer
slug it out on the opera stage during the overture to Rossini's Barber
of Seville. Once Bugs gets Elmer in the barber chair, however, he is
in control, giving Elmer a memorable head message (and fertilizing) during
the middle section of the overture. I am still not sure which is more favored,
this or the "Kill the Wabbit" scene in What's Opera, Doc?
(1957); yet, when I talk to people about cartoon music, one of these
two scenes inevitably comes up.

Photo courtesy of Jerry Beck,
Cartoon Research Co.

Tunesters' Looney-ness
Never let it be said that composers don't have a sense of humor. Haydn
is famous for being the original musical "jokester," a reputation
he gained by doing highly unexpected things in his music. Mozart wrote
a piece called "Ein musikalischer Spaß," which translates
roughly into "a musical joke." Later on, as Chuck Jones points
out, the French composer Erik Satie became known for his collection of
piano pieces, many of which contained humorous, and often ridiculous performance
instructions, such as "bury the sound in the ground" and "He
also loves his pen holder, his green sleeves, and his Chinese cap."

Composers do not only paint pictures and evoke moods within their music,
for they can also tell stories of great depth and detail. Carl Stalling
almost single-handedly brought about a new form of music that did not exist
before 1928. Having established the musical conventions for cartoons, Stalling
basically had an influence on every cartoon composer since his run at Warner
Bros. He was also a master at telling a story through music, with gestures
and nuances so clear, that there is never any doubt as to his intentions.
If you don't believe me, go turn on your television and watch some Looney
Tunes. Turn up the volume and listen while doing something else (exploring
the net, perhaps.) I guarantee you will know exactly what is happening,
and to whom. This was the comedic skill of Carl Stalling.

Daniel Goldmark is a musicologist who spends his
time watching cartoons and talking about medieval music. He currently works
in the bowels of Spümco, where he tries to keep the library and archives
in order, as well as continuing to investigate the role of music in animated
cartoons.